Batch the twelfth. :)
All prompts drawn from the 2021 iteration of the
Three Sentence Ficathon (
post one and
post two), hosted by the wonderful
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rthstewart. The ficathon is now closed to new prompts, but you can continue filling prompts and commenting on other people's fills for as long as you like!
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( 67. ) For
anonymous:
Any, any, a goddess made of starlight and shadows, written 3/31/21
Creator of the Stars of Night (95 words)
Fandom = The Silmarillion-----
It is easy to forget, when faced with her glory, that Varda is not only a goddess of light. She who wrought the stars and set them on high as a comfort and a warning, she whose sight is keen, whose mind is clear, whose purpose adamant, she whose touch destroys evil, is too vast for light alone to encompass the truth of her being, no more than the brilliance of her stars can encompass the whole of the sky.
You must always remember that for the stars to shine, there must first be dark.
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( 68. ) For
notapaladin:
Any, any/any, daemon AU, written 5/19/21
Sense of Self (1,845 words)
Fandom = The Murderbot Diaries-----
Humans and augmented humans tend to assume that constructs have daemons because we straddle the line between true sentience and a bunch of pre-programmed subroutines mindlessly following orders (not that humans are as clearly on one side of that line as they like to think), but it has nothing to do with intelligence levels. It's just that we have a lot of organic parts mostly made from human genetic material, and where you have life composed of human DNA, you eventually get a daemon.
It's even odds whether the fact that our daemons never settle makes humans and augmented humans more or less uncomfortable around us. On the one hand, that kind of flexibility is unnatural for anyone with an adult-sized body, which makes us seem less relatable. On the other hand, humans tend to react negatively to the idea of juvenile humans (or their equivalents of other species) either killing or being killed. This is probably why it's company policy for SecUnits keep our daemons small and hidden within our armor -- unless we're in active combat, in which case there's a short list of approved battle forms.
We do settle sometimes, of course. Even governor modules and memory wipes can't always stop us from developing a sense of self stable enough to coax a daemon into a single form.
This is the second most common reason SecUnits are junked and recycled.
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( 69. ) For
rthstewart:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, any, reclaiming the narrative, written 5/26/21
Take a Third Option (310 words)
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"Want, take, have," Faith told Buffy back in the day, before the murder and torture and betrayal and all that -- and the thing is, the thing it took her a year in prison to sort out, piecing herself together without the pressure to play to or against anyone else's expectations (turns out, you beat a couple assholes up the first week in gen pop and treat the guards like part of the machinery, and most people are real quick to leave you alone), is this:
she wasn't wrong.
Yeah, she fucked up the execution (turns out, just 'cause nobody ever respected her boundaries wasn't a reason to ignore everyone else's in turn; that's just passing on the trauma and pretending it's cool), but the core of it, the raw, bloody, beating heart that screamed her right to have desires -- to want sex, power, respect, love, life -- isn't dirty or shameful or whatever the fuck society feeds girls from babies to grandmas, all those lies about nurture and purity and selflessness until you start to think, fuck it, if wanting makes you evil, then why not be evil -- at least then you can be
yourself instead of a shadow of all the people pressed around you, hungry, trying to hack off bits of your self and your soul until you fit their pet narrative.
Turns out, femme fatale is just as much somebody else's story as chaste heroine -- that old Madonna/whore thing Giles mentioned once to Wesley when they didn't realize Faith was in earshot, where you can be good or you can want things, but never both together -- and Faith is done with playing that game; when she gets out, she'll be more thoughtful with her methods (turns out, sometimes if you ask, people will even give you stuff without threats or bribes), but what she wants, she'll win.
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( 70. ) For
anonymous:
Any, any, a singing bird will come, written 5/26/21
A Wilderness in the Heart (195 words)
Fandom = The Magnus Archives-----
When Agnes is young, it's easy to keep herself open to the voice of her god: to build her heart into a bonfire, to scour away doubt, to drown her very self in the task she was born to complete.
But as the years wear on, as Gertrude's web binds her and the Cult of Lightless Flame splinters around her, Agnes finds certainty hard to hold: the fire fades, the sandstorm stills, the flood ebbs, and Agnes watches the strange green shoots of new thoughts sprout first into weeds (hastily yanked and scorched) and then into moss, thickets, trees -- a thorny forest of questions and yearning.
When she meets Jack Barnabas, she realizes that for all her changes, for all the greenery choking her heart, her soul's landscape is still barren -- no birds have come to build their nests and sing -- and try as she might, she can never outrun the inferno whose embers crackle within her bones; happiness is not within her reach.
Despair feeds the god she no longer wants to serve; better to lay herself waste and let something new, something stronger, take root in her ashes and struggle towards the sun.
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( 71. ) For
anonymous:
Any, any, nectarines, written 5/27/21
All Summer in a Bite (180 words)
Fandom = Chronicles of Narnia-----
Calavar was not peach country -- land good for horses was generally poor for orchards, and vice versa -- but Mezreel claimed all fruits among its thousand delights, and while Aravis would personally contest the quality of their figs and dates, none could truthfully speak against their plums and pears, apples and cherries, their pomegranates and nectarines.
One of her earliest memories was the flash of midsummer sun on her brother's knife, slicing through the delicate, already-bruising skin of a firm, white nectarine and his deft fingers holding out a slice for her own clumsy, plump-fleshed hands to grasp; the juice burst sweet and tart over her tongue like a dream she had forgotten and would yearn for from that day forward.
Archenland was not peach country either, but an esplanade on a south-facing wall, netting and heated stones to guard against late spring frost, bone meal and eggshells kneaded into soil, and a certain amount of bloody-minded faith won her and Cor peaches two years out of three, and her children grew with the taste of summer dreams upon their lips.
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( 72. ) For
notapaladin:
Any, any, a broken crown for a broken throne, written 5/27/21
Final Tithe (90 words)
Fandom = The Magnus Archives-----
King of a ruined world? Why so you shall become, but your throne will be the threads of the trap that binds you helpless as your doom approaches, step by step from the pitiless north; and your crown will be the certainty of death: at first the barest drop dyeing the flood of others' fears, but waxing, ever waxing, until the multitudinous seas run incarnadine with your oldest terror come home to roost.
Enjoy it, Jonah Magnus, in the sliver of thought that remains to you before your self-wrought End.
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And that's as many as I wrote last year, though spread out over a significantly longer period.
I may keep going -- these are nice finger exercises when I don't have the brain to work on anything longer or more complicated.
I should probably also get started on cross-posting them to AO3. *sigh*
